Two wrongs don’t make a right. I think I learned that as a 4-year-old. Apparently, HP and Condé Nast skipped out on that life lesson because they’re combining two dying things—print media and printers—to create the unholiest of unions: your HP printer at home will print out Condé Nast magazines for you to read.

It sounds straight out of the webpages of the Onion but it’s true, Condé Nast magazines like Wired, Details, Epicurious, Glamour, Allure, Golf Digest etc. will be “delivered” to people’s personal HP web printers so that they can presumably read them without having to go to the magazine stand. This is real! You schedule when you want to read the mags and your HP printer starts spitting out the pages. (I’m assuming you have to staple the pages together yourself)

I guess this could work in a bizarro world where there is no such thing as tablets or laptops or computers or smartphones or the Internet or common sense but we’re not living in that world! Instead, we live in an era where people are ditching their printers cause they’re useless, people who have printers never print anything because printer ink is ass expensive and print media is dying (which is legitimately sad). But still, combining print and more print is the dumbest thing HP’s done this… month, I guess.

But HP is serious about this. And since they want to revive the printer as some sort of news hub, they’re offering a subscription service for printer ink delivery. It’s like Netflix but for printer ink! Subscriptions for HP Instant Ink will start from $5.99 to $10.99 per month depending on the product line (shipping included). This will not end well. [HP, Image Credit: photographer2222/Shutterstock]

Upon returning to Apple in 1997 he told the faithful, “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” Once Jobs and Apple did that, and began focusing on iPods, iPhones, and iPads, the company’s earnings and valuation soared.

After years of fighting as an underdog, Apple’s market cap blew by Microsoft‘s last year, making it the world’s most valuable tech company.

Jobs and Apple had finally and definitively triumphed over Microsoft. It’s fitting Jobs was able to enjoy that in the last year of his life.

Did he need market approval? Probably not. But you know he loved getting it.

In reaction to Jobs’ death, Gates was as gracious as could be. He wrote, “The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.”

Online flower marketers experienced another great Mother’s Day season. Traffic to these sites grew by a healthy 7% from May 2010 to May 2011.

The online flower business is a great example of how small, mom and pop businesses might have been given new life thanks to the web. A flower shop in a drab storefront can be re-energized thanks to sites such as Teleflora.

As you can see, the sites are hugely dependent on the Valentine’s and Mother’s Day holidays. Outside of that, traffic is respectable but significantly lower.

One of the more fascinating trends to look at over this past Mother’s Day holiday is the range of cross-shopping that went on across online flower marketing sites.

FTD.com, which has the most loyal followings and largest volumes in the competitive set, saw it’s customer cross-shopping rate double this year. Meanwhile, sites such as Proflowers, BloomsToday and 1-800 Flowers saw an improvement in customer loyalty during the Mother’s Day flower buying season.

You have to wonder just how much more these sites can continue to grow in their current form. The seasonality issue is challenging. Right now, the sites are all focused on delivering fresh-cut flowers and other gifts to celebrate a special occasion.

As a recent homebuyer, I would not mind seeing more attention paid to outdoor plants and trees. The products are subtly marketed on sites, but the marketing is not prominently displayed. Imagine being able to log onto 1800flowers.com and create a “gift registry” of plants and trees that you wanted for a housewarming gift. Friends could log on and arrange to have them delivered the same day as a housewarming celebration.

What about ordering vegetable plants for mom’s garden during the upcoming summer as a Mother’s Day gift? The opportunities are endless out there to either increase the average order value and to shift consumer mindset from holidays and birthdays to other life events / purposes.

How’s this sound: A movie subscription that lets you watch unlimited movies in theaters for 50 bucks a month. It’s like Netflix but for the real, real life. Would that be something you’re interested in?

Called MoviePass, it’s a service that’ll let users use a smartphone app to handle all their movie bookings. For 50 bucks a month (additional $3 for each IMAX or 3D), users of MoviePass will get unlimited access to any movie playing in participating theaters. If you’re not that psycho about watching movies, they also have a ‘lite’ package of 4 movies for 30 bucks. Either way, they’re rolling out a private beta in San Francisco right now that includes 21 different theaters and hopes to expand to other US cities throughout the summer. The goal is to put MoviePass in 40% of the theaters across the US.

I know people who—rain or shine, $15 bucks for a ticket or higher, popcorn or no popcorn—just have to watch movies in the theater. This is going to be perfect for them. Would you guys use this? [MoviePass via Wired]

Here’s food for thought: Some cities are considerably more densely populated than others. Imagine packing all 6.9 billion people in the world into a city you know. How much space would that megacity take up?

Per Square Mile made these infographics to give you an idea of what you’d find. In the image above, they stuffed the world’s people into a city as dense as Houston. We’d take up most of the continental United States.Now New York, with everyone fitting into Texas.And now Paris. Kind of makes you wonder what life would be like. [Per Square Mile]

In 2010, attendance in Major League Baseball was down for the third straight year. And early indicators suggest that 2011 will just be more of the same.

If we look at every team and what their attendance was after the same number of home games a year ago, we see that attendance is down 1.9 percent. That doesn’t seem that bad. But at this pace it would be just another step in continuing trend.

But more importantly, we can now see that some teams are suffering much more than others.

So far in 2011, five teams are down at least 10 percent in attendance from the same point a year ago. And one of those teams (Tampa Bay) has a winning record.

But attendance isn’t down everywhere. The Blue Jays and Rangers are both up more 30 percent from a year ago.

And also keep in mind that we are dealing with percentages here, not absolute numbers. It is much easier for the Blue Jays to achieve a 44.3 percent increase when they were only averaging 15,000 fans per game at this point last year than it would be for the Yankees who were averaging 45,000 in 2010.

After a court order was issued preventing rapper-turned-hacker George Hotz from ever hacking Sony products again, Hotz is now boycotting the electronics giant’s wares.

As previously posted, Hotz agreed to, basically, never mess around with another Sony product ever again. He’s barred from “unauthorized access to any Sony product under the law”, and will be in deep trouble if he violates a Sony product’s terms of service, “whether or not Hotz has accepted such agreement or terms of use”.

If he’s found to have breached those stipulations, he’s liable to face a $10,000 fine per violation, up to a maximum “cap” of $250,000.

In the wake of this, Hotz is taking part in a Sony boycott. “I am joining the SONY boycott,” Hotz blogged earlier this week. “I will never purchase another SONY product.”

“I encourage you to do the same,” he added. “And if you bought something SONY recently, return it.”

If Hotz was buying Sony products to hack and tinker with, it doesn’t make much sense for him to purchase them. But it’s like he’s rolling over, taking his toys and going home. Not everyone likes what Sony did to Hotz, sure, but then again, not everyone tries to hack Sony products. Some people like to play video games on them.

Even with the order issue settled, Hotz doesn’t seem like he’s ready to let it go. In one of his most recent posts, titled “A New Topic”, Hotz continues to rail on Sony. He now says the focus of the blog will be the Other OS lawsuit. His next post details his appearance in the mainstream media. Go figure.

But why should anyone care what Hotz thinks about this Other OS case? He caved, gave in, agreed he wouldn’t hack Sony products again. Sure, he didn’t get sued for a gajillion dollars, but Sony “won”. Hotz did not.

Writes Hotz, “Basically if Sony does bad things, you better not call them out, or they’ll attempt to make your life hell.”

Kiip, the seven month-old mobile ads startup, is finally coming out of stealth today and revealing an entirely new model for in-game advertising, one that offers users value instead of fighting an uphill battle for their attention.

Going beyond the banner and text ads used by industry leaders iAd and AdMob, the team behind Kiip has thought long and hard about the way people actually play games and has come to conclusion that the moments when players experience in-game achievements like upping a level, completing a challenge or accumulating a certain number of points are the most valuable in terms of providing the most user engagement.

Unlike Tap.me, Kiip doesn’t just show an ad when those moments are achieved. What it does instead is pretty interesting: Kiip has partnered up with big brands like Sephora, popchips, Homerun.com, Sony Dash, Vitamin Water, 1-800-Flowers, Dr. Pepper, GNC, Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s to offer players actual in-game rewards like a voucher for six bags of popchips, a lipstick sample or a complimentary smoothie when they complete gaming milestones.

“Achievements are the universal currency for accomplishment and every game in the world has achievments,” 19-year-old Kiip co-founder Brian Wong tells me, explaining what he calls the “Achievement Moment.” “The achievement itself isn’t the cool thing, it’s the moment. We realized that the moment was worth something. The natural evolution is to put something there that actually matches the achievement.”

Wong emphasizes that Kiip (pronounced Keep) isn’t a conventional ads network but a “Rewards Network”. Hmmm … It depends on what you consider an ad. Offering players custom-tailored rewards is basically lead generation. It’s an easy away for advertisers to associate their brand with a positive moment, almost diabolical in its simplicity; “Driving for customer acquisition when players are happy.”

As of midnight tonight the Kiip Rewards Network will be rolling out rewards in over 15 games, reaching 12 million monthly active users (Wong wouldn’t tell me which games they were involved with so if anyone sees a Kiip ad please let me know). Brands will pay up when a user signs up for a reward, from 25 cents to $3 per cost per engagement.

The rewards themselves are actually targeted algorithmically based on the game demographics, for example if no girls play a game there will be no offers for lipstick. If someone ends up with something they don’t want they can always gift it.

Kiip is also complimentary to other mobile ad networks as it only provides rewards for achievements and doesn’t get into banner ads or the real estate business. Says Wong, “People have been too focused on real estate and pieces of the screen being part of the advertising equation, but they’ve completely overlooked the notion of moments, moments where you’re happy, moments when you engage. These moments are worth something.”

Co-founded by former Digg employees Wong, Courtney Guertin and Sequence’s Amadeus Demarzi, Kiip pocketed $4 million in Series A funding from Hummer Winblad and True Ventures just last week. Wong tells me the team has got a lot more up its sleeve, and as always, you’ll read about it first here.

About Me

Dr. Augustine Fou is an expert in digital strategy and social media marketing, with over 15 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience. He now serves as digital strategy advisor to global brands and their agencies shifting dollars more aggressively into digital channels.